


Dulce et Decorum

by lusilly



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Child Loss, Doubt, Gen, Loss, Loss of Innocence, Loyalty, Patriotism, Royalty, Visions, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8908153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lusilly/pseuds/lusilly
Summary: "My life I give to my country. With my hands I fight for my Fire Lord and our forefathers before him. With my mind I seek ways to better my country. And with my feet may our March of Civilization continue."Such was the duty of Iroh, Crown Prince to the Fire Nation throne.





	

**Author's Note:**

> have had this tucked away on my computer for So Long and i just need to get rid of it!!!

_My life I give to my country. With my hands I fight for my Fire Lord and our forefathers before him. With my mind I seek ways to better my country. And with my feet may our March of Civilization continue._

-The Fire Nation Oath

\---

            In school they ask this of children. _What will you give for your country?_

            Some children answer, _My mind_. Others, _My strength_. Boys with burning palms smoke like embers, flames licking around their knuckles, and pledge, “ _My life_.” In the Imperial Palace, room bedecked with silks and gold, the crown prince sleeps fitfully, as the spirits bring him a vision in his slumber.

            A brilliant red dragon greets him, guardian of fire; it intertwines with a great blue dragon, spirit of heat and lightening. The two circle around him, engulfing him in a column of fire which crackles and whispers in his ear, betraying secrets of an ancient art, secrets which will later eke out of his memory once he awakes. He longs for it, _aches_ for this knowledge, and allows himself to be consumed in the fire. Rebirth awaits him: the dragons have told him so.

            Above him, the sky turns red. The dragons vanish. An army of Fire Nation soldiers swarm over a city, and a flag burns before the Palace of the Earth King.

            When dawn brings the sun flooding into the prince’s chambers, he feels the fire in his chest, scorching his mouth as he exhales a blush of flames. The secrets the dragons whispered have all vanished from his mind, but the spirits have been kind of him: he has been blessed with a vision of conquering Ba Sing Se.

            In cape and armor, wearing the headpiece of the crown prince in his hair, Iroh strides through the Imperial Palace. He is eighteen years old, and engaged to the daughter of a noble family from the south; once he marries and produces an heir, as his father has commanded, he will be fit for military service. He is an impatient child, and now that the spirits have granted him this vision, he sees no reason to wait. On the way to the War Council he passes his baby brother in the courtyard, tended to by an imperial nanny. Joyfully, he sweeps his brother up into his arms, tossing him into the air and then catching him. The child laughs and laughs, clinging to his older brother.

            “Today is a good day, Ozai,” Iroh tells his brother, holding Ozai on his hip. “My Agni has deemed me worthy, and he brings me visions of conquest, of victory for the Fire Nation.” He kisses his baby brother on the forehead, and the little boy squeals, squirming happily in Iroh’s arms.  “I can only hope that you are there with me,” Iroh adds, sincerely, “on the day that we bring peace and civilization to the people of the Earth Kingdom.”

            He returns Ozai to his caretakers, thanking them for their duty, and proceeds forward, towards the throne room. The War Council is in session, the old Generals of the Imperial Army gathered around a table to consider their next attack. Despite this, Iroh knows that his vision takes precedence – his father Azulon is a superstitious man, and himself a hunter of dragons, fearful of their supernatural qualities. The Fire Nation army is grinding to a slow halt as it reaches the plains of the Earth Kingdom, where each village burned and tribute collected inspires more fight than the soldiers can keep up with: earthbenders are more powerful than the Fire Nation anticipated, as even fire cannot penetrate a wall of rock. This war is slowing down. Now more than ever, Iroh knows, his father, the Generals, and the soldiers themselves need a victory to boost morale.

            Iroh enters unannounced, the tall doors to the throne room creaking open. Chatter stops within; the Fire Lord looks up at his son beyond a moat of fire.

            “I bring news,” he declares. “Of victory.”

\---

            After Iroh explains his vision, the Generals cheer with triumph. Fire Lord Azulon dismisses his War Council, and he descends from his throne, not an old man, but no longer young. Iroh waits on bended knee for his father.

            When Azulon stands before his son, he says: “Rise, Prince Iroh.”

            His heart pounding with excitement and pride, Iroh gets to his feet.

            The back of Azulon’s hand collides hard with Iroh’s cheek. It stings. He stumbles, nearly knocked off his feet.

            With angry, fiery eyes, Azulon spits, “Your news is soiled by your disrespect. If you ever speak out of turn in my throne room again, boy, I will have no choice but to teach you the meaning of discipline myself.”

            Iroh protests, “Father-”

            “Your celebration is premature, Prince Iroh,” warned Azulon, his voice low. “The spirits are fickle beings. If you lose favor – if they deem you unworthy – then the future you have witnessed…will go up in smoke.”

            Azulon clasped his hands together behind his back. At his movement, the line of fire dimmed behind him, then flickered out.

            Before his father, Iroh stared for one moment in disbelief, so sure he had been about to gain his father’s favor.

            Then he dropped to his knees.

            “I understand,” he said, eyes focused on the ground. He pressed his hands to the shining floor of the throne room, lowering his face so his forehead touched the ground. “Forgive me, Father.”

            Fire Lord Azulon watched his eldest son with a heavy brow.

            “You do not have the discipline for command,” he remarked mildly, turning away from his son. “I do not grant your request. You will remain here in the Fire Nation capital until it is clear to me that you deserve the honor of directing my men in battle.”

            As Azulon retreated from the throne room, Iroh remained with his face pressed against the ground, motionless until the tall doors had creaked shut behind him.

\---

            The Imperial Army suffers a humiliation at the hands of an organized force of earthbenders from the countryside. A battalion is killed. Iroh wears white in mourning, but his father is seized with rage when he sees. _The people must not know_ , he instructs his son, behind a curtain, where no one can hear. _The people must never doubt the power of their country_.

            In penance Iroh retreats to Ember Island, where his wife nurses their newborn. Fire Lord Azulon does not allow births in the Imperial Palace; his superstition renders him susceptible to omens, and babies and women sometimes die in childbirth. He refuses to invite death into his home. So Iroh’s first son is born in the beach home of the Fire Nation Royal Family, under a burning red-streaked sunset. They name the child Lu Ten, after the legendary Sun Warrior and tamer of dragons. He is a sweet and gentle child. He takes after his mother.

            Iroh sings the baby to sleep on nights when his wife falls asleep, exhausted by the trials of motherhood. There is a song his mother used to sing to him when he was a boy, a lullaby for generations of Fire Nation boys sent to war. _Leaves from the vine, falling so slow…_

            When Iroh returns to court, he asks his father again if he may go to war. He offers to lead the resurgence into Earth Kingdom territory after last year’s retreat, but Azulon again denies his request. In the War Council, Iroh sits silently by his father’s side as Generals speak of troops dying from hunger and illness. Iroh realizes there is no army to command.

\---

            The vision of two dragons return. They swirl around and around him, fire wrapped around his body. It does not burn him: it feels as cold as ice.

            He wakes in a cold sweat, his wife fast asleep in bed beside him. Panic grips him; _no_ , he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut, willing himself back to sleep. _No! That can’t be all! The spirits cannot take this vision away from me! I am the crown prince of the Fire Nation, as decreed by the Fire Sages themselves! The spirits cannot abandon me!_

            Sleep does not return to him.

            He slips out of bed. Exhausted, and terrified, Iroh quietly makes his way down the trail to the beach, where the sun breaks above the water’s horizon.

            Inside of him, heat billows up like anger. The spirits will _not_ abandon him, he will not permit them to do so. Somewhere out there two dragons wait for him, the last of their kind – he will find them, he will slay them, and he will _make_ his vision become reality, no matter how long it takes.

            With a deep breath, something strikes in his belly like flint, and a spark turns to fire, and he spits flames across the ocean, raising steam along the surface of the water.

            Water is oppositional to fire, is flexible and moldable in a world where Iroh cannot afford to be either. The waves lap at his feet and he thinks of the strongholds of the Northern Water Tribe, impenetrable for centuries. As he watches the ocean, vast and heavy, he almost envies the Water Tribe, that they may adapt so easily to changing times, that they may exist in peace when his country fights a bitter war. He catches himself wondering if waterbenders, too, might be more powerful than his people credit them to be, like the earthbenders who beat back an entire invading army.

            A thought occurs to Iroh. To his father it might treason; to the Fire Sages it might be heresy; and yet, he thinks, the Fire Nation fails in war because it fails to consider those of other nations capable of fighting back. Evidence flies in the face of such Fire Nation arrogance, and yet _still_ , Iroh’s father prepares his troops with nothing but rhetoric of the superiority of their great country. If their powers are so great, why does Ba Sing Se remain the refuge of the Earth Kingdom? How are the greatest soldiers in the world repelled by a group of ragtag peasants?

            _This is a weakness_ , he thinks, and knows even the thought of Fire Nation inferiority is treason. He cannot remain here with his countrymen, not while they die because of the arrogance of the men who send them to war.

            Fire Lord Sozin began this war with intent to bring the brilliance and modernity of the Fire Nation to all corners of the world. His son Azulon inherited that responsibility upon his father’s death; and now one day, so would Iroh. He is determined to fulfill his grandfather’s vision before his death, so that he may relieve his son of carrying such a burden.

            But to do so, Prince Iroh of the Fire Nation would first have to walk away from his country. In order to conquer the world, one must first understand it. In order to rule the world, one must first come to love it. All of it, not just the fertile lands and beautiful cities of the motherland.

            In the early morning light, Iroh pens a letter to his wife. He slips into his son’s room and, while Lu Ten sleeps, Iroh lowers his lips to the boy’s face and kisses his forehead. Then he lowers the ceremonial armor across his shoulders, and he rides towards the harbor as his family begins to wake in the home on Ember Islands.

            He travels first back to the heartland of his country, where he cloaks his face and pays off servants to keep his return a secret from his father. From the Imperial vaults, he studies stolen scrolls, techniques of the Water Tribes, ancient Earth Kingdom translations, vast histories written by the Air Nomads. It is the dead language of the Air Nomads which captivates him most deeply. One by one he visits three of the Air Temples, each more inaccessible than the last.

            The fabled Eastern Air Temple does not, as far as Iroh can tell, exist; he cannot find it even by mongoose lizard, animals equipped to crawl up sheer rock. The Western Air Temple is the closest he returns to home; and for a moment, he considers returning to see his wife and son. A year has already passed on his search, and he suspects this journey will take many more.

            The Crown Prince of the Fire Nation travels alone. He skirts the central plains of the Earth Kingdom, instead making his way around the colonies. He finds marriages and families made of parents from both nations. A kind woman with a fondness for tea shelters him for a week, then the week turns into months, and then Iroh leaves again in the night when he cannot sleep, plagued by dreams of his wife and his son, and the shame of his father if he ever discovered Iroh had loved an Earth Kingdom woman.

            Iroh travels to the Southern Air Temple. Unlike its two sister temples, these ruins had not been picked over by the Fire Nation. It looked like no one had ever been there since the final battle itself. As he explored the empty place, Iroh kicked pre-Imperial style Fire Nation helmets and the skulls of the Air Nomads alike. In one cloister, a single skeleton, still clad in the robes of a monk, laid surrounded by a dozen or more slain Fire Nation soldiers.

            Awed by the power and majesty of the Air Nomads – a _weak_ people, a people who did not believe in violence and therefore fell swiftly at its hand – Iroh fell to his knees, and bowed as deeply to the old monk as he ever had towards his father. There was something spiritual about this place, about the dignity of skeletal piles, where the Fire Nation soldiers didn’t even have the decency to cremate the remains.

            For months Iroh stays in the Southern Air Temple, gathering every Air Nomad body he can find. There are elderly monks, bones bent with age; there are children, far younger now than Iroh’s own son, whose tiny skeletons, so fragile in Iroh’s hands, break him beyond reason. _Children_ , he thinks, heart rent in two, betrayed and disgusted by his country. _Children_.

            Iroh does not know how the Air Nomads take care of their dead. Some part of him thinks it perverse that he dare use fire to dispose of the remains of a culture eliminated by firebenders; but he kneels once more before the feet of the dead monk and begs forgiveness. He pleads reverence. He finds a library half-destroyed, and there a record of airbending techniques, the only evidence of a dead art, lost forever.

            He spends nights poring over the scrolls. He burns them afterwards. He would rather see them gone from the face of the earth than see them rot in the vaults of the Imperial Palace.

            At the highest open point of the Temple, Iroh brings every body he can find. In honor and respect, he leaves the old monk surrounded by slain soldiers, as testament to the power of a nation he had been raised to see as weak. In the cold and bitter wind, he sees the empty corpses, long-ago rotten, as he imagines they would want their bones to be seen: part of the earth, a small part in the large scheme of the world.

            They were not small. They were a great and wise people. Deep in his bones, Iroh regrets the death of the Air Nomads.

            There, against the open skies, Iroh moves smoothly, fluidly, the aggressive stance required of the firebending he knew softening, turning into something more like a dance. In the style of the airbenders, Iroh blew fire onto the bones of a civilization, and when he had reduced them to dust, the wind came sweeping in from the east, and it carried with it the ashen remains of its people.

            Iroh wept.

\---

            He writes to his family; his son writes a letter in return. It is with a bolt of shock that Iroh realizes how much the boy had grown.

            _Uncle Ozai has married_ , Lu Ten writes. _My cousin will be born this summer._ _Come home_ , he writes.

            Iroh goes west.

\---

            In a pillar of kaleidoscope fire, Iroh falls to his knees and retches. Once more secrets whisper into his ear, but they horrify him. It is all wrong. He has been raised in lies, fed falsehoods from the tongues of his forefathers. He has known all his life that fire is the element of _power_ , because the only power that matters is the power to kill and destroy, because if you do not possess that power you will always be at the mercy of others who do.

            But the dragons envelop him in warmth and light. Fire is the power of life, and life he has eschewed too long.

\---

            When he recovered, the Sun Warriors gifted him with a dragon’s pearl, still warm from basking in flames. With this Iroh returned to the homeland, an exalted hero, the Dragon of the West.

            Ten years Iroh remains at home. As his father ages, his mind begins to slip, as Fire Lord Sozin’s did before him; Azulon becomes suspicious at every turn, his superstition ruling every miniscule decision made at the Palace. Iroh retreats to Ember Island with his family when his wife falls ill.

\---

            Saisha, Lady of the Fire Nation, wife to the Crown Prince, dies on the eve of ten thousand troops launching a second wave into the heart of the Earth Kingdom. Prince Iroh wears white in mourning at the meeting of the War Council. Afterwards, when his father raises his hand, Iroh catches him by the wrist and stares him in the eye, daring his father to try.

            The next day, Azulon names his eldest son a general, War Minister of the campaign in the Earth Kingdom. He is sent east within the week.

            When the siege of Ba Sing Se begins, Iroh writes to his father of his success. The army pounds away at the walls of the Earth Kingdom capital, starving its inhabitants. In due time, he assures his father, we will force a surrender.

            In return, Fire Lord Azulon sends Iroh’s eighteen-year-old son to the front lines with a message for his father.

            _A surrender is not a defeat_ , the old man writes. _Your country demands the victory you promised them_.

            Three times Iroh attempts to send his son home, but three times Lu Ten refuses, citing the wishes of his grandfather. Apologetic and on bended knee, Lu Ten tells his father, “My supreme loyalty lies with the Fire Lord, Father. Not with you.”

            General Iroh does not command his son a fourth time. In the Fire Lord’s house, the number four was an unlucky number: a number of death. Iroh did not consider himself beholden to the superstitions of his father, and yet still, he said no more. The Fire Nation would survive a protracted siege, a war of attrition. His father would swallow a hollow victory or he would swallow no victory at all. But Iroh could not survive the loss of his son.

\---

            It happens like this: the Fire Nation breaks through the Outer Walls of Ba Sing Se. The protectors of the Earth Kingdom wait until the Fire Nation soldiers are halfway in, streaming forward towards victory. Then they retreat. They bring down the rest of the wall behind them.

\---

            Ten thousand dead in one night.

\---

            When he next returns to the Imperial Palace, Iroh removes the headpiece of the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation from his hair, and he presents it to his nephew. Laboriously, knees stiff from the wounds of war, Iroh lowers himself to the ground, and presses his face to the floor.

\---

            At nighttime, when Prince Zuko is asleep and the ship rocks gently with the swaying waves, Iroh will sometimes sit beside his nephew and imagine his son is not dead. After all, Ozai forfeited all rights to fatherhood when he burned his child, and therefore it is now Iroh’s responsibility to love this boy. To teach him. To raise him. And to bring him home.

\---

            _Brave soldier boy, come marching home…_


End file.
